]]>This progressive art institution is situated on the rolling hills in the Lake District, and based upon the legacy of the author of the Arts & Crafts movement John Ruskin.

My journey to the remote location consisted of a plane to Manchester, thereafter train followed by a stunning stretch of three hours past the mid-england westcoast to Ulverston, where I was picked up by director Adam Sutherland to go by car up the hills between Coniston and Lake Windermere.

Grizedale is run as a small farmhold, with a number of activities connected, and a vast pineforrest around in which you can take walks and encounter some of the many installations and sculptures. The institution is a curatorial project in a constant development with an experimental and inventional spirit present. When I visited they where preparing the show ‘Wantee’ with artist Laure Prouvost, that then came to win the Turner Prize, based upon the legacy of late Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) work, who lived his last years in the forrest nearby.

The methodology of Grizedale lies in their curation of off-site art projects of various kinds, approaching the programmes with an awareness of the social, economical, cultural and historical circumstances. The Lake District suffers from a swarm of tourists in the summer and isolation in the winter, with the seasonal shift affecting the society and the relationship to their surroundings on many levels. Grizedales take on this are slightly provocative, and I was told lots of stories of how the meetings between the artists and the community are both a challenge and platform for communication and initiatives.

]]>The Real Wealth Of Athenshttp://bygningskulturenshus.dk/blog_entries/real-wealth-athens/
Fri, 09 Oct 2015 11:26:38 +0000http://bygningskulturenshus.dk/?post_type=blog_entries&p=5859In these troubled times it is easy to forget what Greece has given to the world. The cradle of Western…

]]>In these troubled times it is easy to forget what Greece has given to the world. The cradle of Western civilisation, Ancient Greece has provided us with much of what we know of today as democracy, philosphy, tragedy, comedy, poetry, mathematics, and, of course, the Olympic Games.

Many institutions have emerged in Athens over the last couple of hundred years to research, preserve and display the culture of Greece from Ancient times until more recently. This series documents some of those institutions: libraries, schools, museums and foundations which are part of the culture that protects the culture of Greece.

Filippos Tsimpoglou Ph.D., Director General of the National Library of Greece

The National Library of Greece, founded in 1832

Waiting outside a reading room at the National Library of Greece

The National Archeolgical Museum of Athens, founded in 1829

Aphrodite Panagiotakou, Vice-Director of the Onassis Cultural Center in the Hellenic Library

Cieling of the Numismatic Museum, which houses one of the largest collections of coins, ancient and
modern, in the world. Founded in 1838

Professor Catherine A. Morgan O.B.E., Director of the British School at Athens. Founded in 1866,
the School promotes research of international excellence in all disciplines pertaining to Greek lands,
from fine art to archaeometry and in all periods to modern times.

The Fitch Laboratory at the British School at Athens, where scientific techniques are used to analyse
materials from animal bones to ancient pottery. Analysis of such materials gives usefull insight into
where things were made, how they were made, where things travelled from and so on.

The Fitch Laboratory reference collection of animal bones, hosting modern skeletons of a large
number of species, facilitates the visual characterization of the often fragmented bones recovered
from excavations

The Benaki Museum, founded in 1930. Includes Greek art from all periods.

]]>The Test Facilities Of The European Space Agency, The Netherlandshttp://bygningskulturenshus.dk/blog_entries/test-facilities-european-space-agency-netherlands/
Fri, 14 Aug 2015 09:39:36 +0000http://bygningskulturenshus.dk/?post_type=blog_entries&p=5760A soundsystem that is so loud you would die instantly if you were in the room when it was turned…

]]>A soundsystem that is so loud you would die instantly if you were in the room when it was turned on. A huge vacuum chamber that can achieve a vacuum a billion times lower than sea level atmosphere, while creating the cryogenic temperatures of space and reproducing the unfiltered sunlight of the sun. Nice.

The European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) main development and test center for spacecraft and space technology. Established in 1968 and situated in Noordwijk, Holland, at some point almost all the equipment launched by the ESA will be tested here. About 2500 engineers and scientists work at ESTEC, and it is the place where European space missions are born. Space is not a very nice place to be, and it takes a hell of a lot of effort and money to put something up there – and once it is up there, it had better work because it isn’t going to be easy to fix. Right now, ESTEC is working on the Galileo project, the European GPS system. At the moment, Europe relies on GPS systems run by the US, Russia and China, but these could be turned off in times of war – so Europe is developing its own independent system. Four satellites have already been launched, but the final system will consist of 30 satellites and is expected to be completed in 2019.

A lot of the facilities at ESTEC concern simulating the conditions of launches and of being in space, to test how equipment will react. The Large Space Simulator (LSS) is the largest vacuum chamber in Europe, and is used (as the name suggests) to simulate the conditions of space. And it is large. It is so large that whole spacecraft can fit inside it. Opened in 1986, the LSS creates a vacuum inside the chamber and chills down to the temperatures of space. A powerful array of xenon lamps, reflected off hundreds of small mirrors, reproduces the unfiltered sunlight encountered in Earth orbit, and the piece of equipment is then rotated to test how these extreme fluctuations in temperature will affect it. Tests on a piece of equipment can last for weeks at a time in the LSS, as the change in temperature constantly cycles to reproduce the quick shifts in temperature caused as spacecraft move in and out of sunlight.

The Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF) is a soundsystem like no other. It is used to test how satellites and other equipment will react to the stress caused by the extremely loud sounds produced by a rocket launching. My guide, Anneke, told me that if that if the sound was turned on at its lowest volume, you would die instantly. Your eardrums would probably explode. “Wow! Have you you ever tried to put a tomato in here to see what happens?” I ask. “No” she says with a straight face. OK … That would definitely be my first experiment if I had control of this thing. There probably wouldn’t be many satellites making into space though.

LEAF sits inside a huge chamber that is separate from the surrounding building, to stop the vibrations knocking it down. The walls are half a meter thick, and according to Anneke it took two weeks to fill the door with concrete. The walls are coated with epoxy resin to reduce noise absorption and increase reverberation, and apparently the rather pleasing mint colour is there for a practical reason. The horns that produce the sound have the same basic design as your stereo at home, and can reach volumes of 156 decibels. The noise itself is produced by passing pressurised nitrogen gas through the horns.

The blue spiky room is what’s known as an anechoic chamber. Known at ESTEC as the Compact Payload Test Range (CPTR), the room is used to test the way that satellites send and receive radio waves. The spikes are filled with carbon powder and they stop radio waves bouncing around, simulating the conditions of, you guessed it, space. There currently a competition open to the public to find a new name for the CPTR (I guess they need something with a bit more of a ring to it) – so if you’ve got any suggestions, check out this page: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering/Give_a_name_to_ESA_s_zone_of_silence

A big thanks to Anneke for showing me around and helping to organise everything.

]]>Postcards Of Modern Relics: The Facilities Of The 2004 Athens Olympic Gameshttp://bygningskulturenshus.dk/blog_entries/postcards-modern-relics-facilities-2004-athens-olympic-games/
Fri, 22 May 2015 12:38:04 +0000http://bygningskulturenshus.dk/?post_type=blog_entries&p=5562If you google “Olympics Athens” you won’t get hits about Greece being the birthplace of the Olympics, or about the…

]]>If you google “Olympics Athens” you won’t get hits about Greece being the birthplace of the Olympics, or about the glories of the two modern Olympics that have been held there. What you will get are hits about how the facilities of the 2004 Athens Olympics have been left abandoned since the games ended and have fallen into a state of serious disrepair. See “The new ruins of Athens” shouts the Daily Mail. “Ten years on, Athens 2004 gives Greece little to cheer about” gloats Reuters. I was fascinated by these structures and I wanted to see if the reports were true. I wanted to photograph the sites beautifully and dramatically, and bring them into a fantasy world where they really could compete with the Acropolis – I wanted to create postcard pictures of the venues.

I had been challenged by Nikon to produce a series in Athens in two days that shows off their lenses. I decided to photograph the venues at night, to add drama and bring out the strange atmosphere and colours that can be achieved with really long exposures. Other photographers had been to the sites during the day, so I needed to create a series that was different to what they had done, and I love the idea of playing with this fantasy world. Most of the venues were in complete darkness when I took the pictures, but after a 60 second exposure an image pops up that is nothing like the dark blob that I can see in front of me. I wanted to focus on all the venues of the Olympics, and not only on the ones that are no longer used – so some of the pictures are of facilities that are still in operation. Right next to the empty diving pool is a pool full of kids getting swimming lessons. But even the facilities that are still being used are not being maintained properly and starting to fall apart – chunks of concrete are falling off buildings and weeds and graffiti are overtaking the stadiums. I am sad to say it is hard to imagine that they will still be standing in twenty five years, let alone two and a half thousand years.

]]>Trinity Methodist Church, Englandhttp://bygningskulturenshus.dk/blog_entries/trinity-methodist-church-england/
Mon, 23 Mar 2015 12:25:07 +0000http://bygningskulturenshus.dk/?post_type=blog_entries&p=5346I’m no God-squadder, but I do like a good church – something to do with all that delicious symmetry and symbolism. Some…

]]>I’m no God-squadder, but I do like a good church – something to do with all that delicious symmetry and symbolism. Some crackers were built in the 60s, such as this sexy little number in Woking, England: Trinity Methodist Church. According to the church’s website the buildings were dedicated on the 12th July 1965, and designed by “a distinguished firm of architects” inspired by the Anglican cathedral in Mbale, Uganda. “It was deliberately modern in style to stress its relevance to the society it is serving.”